


Paper Ants

by Onus



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Ember is having a very bad day, Gen, POV Ember, The author has headcannons, and this is the first of many excuses to write about them, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:21:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28132347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Onus/pseuds/Onus
Summary: The only thing worse than being stuck with your enemy after escaping an insane government facility is being forced to listen to said enemy as he blathers on and on about space, ghosts, and space ghosts. Add power suppressing cuffs on top of that, and you have the makings of a truly terrible day.Or: Halfas are trouble magnets and Ember really should have just stayed home.
Comments: 17
Kudos: 68





	1. Run

Paper Ants

“–So it's not space or time, it's spacetime, 'cause it's all one thing, and get this, it's bendy, too.”

“Dipstick –”

“You think that's how Clockwork makes those blue portals wherever he wants?”

“Not the time Dipstick!”

“That's what I'm saying, Sam, he's not the ghost of time, but spacetime like, all at once, you know?

“Don't know!”

A fresh volley of blaster fire forced Ember to dodge, jostling the lanky burden splayed across her back. That all of this was happening after Phantom's frankly alarming growth spurt was typical, Ember found, of her poor to lousy luck. This would have all been so much easier back when he was a midget. 

“Don't care!”

She continued to barrel down the wooded slope, trying, and failing, to dodge the innumerable branches that turned the area into a great, brown spider's web. Ember didn't like nature on a good day, and today was not a good day. It was a horrible, shitty, get-ambushed-and-captured-and-then-rescued-by-a-Dipstick-who-really-should-have-melted-by-now kind of day, and so far as things were going, sentient living realm foliage with a vendetta against all ghostkind would have been par for the course. 

“Not you're girlfriend!”

Ancients, but she should've just stayed home. 

“Aw, Sam, you said the whole real world physics and ghosts thing was cool.”

Because of course he would. Of all the regrettable things Ember had learned about Phantom as he blathered endlessly on whatever passed through his hollow excuse for a core, it was that he was a giant dweeb. The most dangerous ghost the Wasteland had seen in ages, who not only claimed a permanent portal as part of his territory, but held it against all comers, was a hopeless, Poindexter worthy nerd under the honest assumption that science was a girlfriend worthy topic. The fact that he actually did manage to get a girlfriend, even a spooky living girlfriend like the one always making doe eyes at him when she thought he wasn't looking, just made the whole thing more galling. 

The guys who beat her up and ruined her plans for world domination weren't supposed to be lame, dammit!

Another hail of blaster fire cut the thought short, forcing her to skew left to avoid getting hit. With the powers of both herself and Phantom suppressed to nothing, their physical bodies were all they had left. 

She ignored the way Phantom whined as he slid partly off her back, putting all her focus on maintaining her increasingly precarious speed as she all but slid down the wooded gradient. They were gaining distance, she knew, which only fueled her desire to gain more. 

For a split second, she thought she had it, her sideways momentum seemed to balance with her forward skid, riding down the steepening slope with a speed that felt almost like flight. Almost, but not quite. 

Then, the branches, one of the countless amputated limbs that littered the rotten brown battlefield reached out to grab her. Ember had just enough time to register the flare of pain before tilting forwards, all semblance of control lost as she and her delirious cargo went tumbling down into the dampish maw of the cold, dark woods. 

Ember's first thought, as she shook off the disorientation from her fall, was that all her prior concerts had clearly skimped on the pyrotechnics. Anywhere with this many trees obviously needed more fire. Her second thought was that she hurt far more than she did before. 

All the major wounds on her right side had reopened, bright green ooze coating the older, duller stains already covering the hospital gown she'd been forced into upon her arrival at the facility. Her head hurt, and she could feel a cold welter of fresh ectoplasm seeping into her hair.

And her toe, Ancients, her toe, it throbbed in time with every rotation of her core, and assaulted her mind with a sense of searing agony whenever the least bit of pressure was placed against it. Naturally, thanks to the suppressor rings around her wrist, she had no choice but to do exactly that all the time, constantly, if she wanted to remain upright. Never again would she take for granted a ghost's natural tendency to float. Why the Dipstick voluntarily spent half his time walking around when he could just fly instead was an damn mystery. 

Reminded of her unwanted passenger, Ember took a glance at the half human, who lay uncharacteristically still amongst the foliage, and winced.

He had been worse off than her from the start, pretending he wasn't already bleeding from a hit to the side in their fight earlier that day. The humans had done their own damage, too, contributing a long, vertical incision up the belly, turning ragged and ugly where the work of the butcher who did it must have been interrupted at the ribs. As though that weren't enough, Ember was certain he'd been drugged. Some manner of hallucinogen, it seemed, designed to keep him passive while the Gunts in White, (she had the niggling suspicion that the name wasn't quite right,) played their game of real life operator. 

It was a testiment to the incredible vitality of halfas that he'd managed to stay upright long enough to escape, and an act of proper insanity that he'd spent most that vanishing energy rescuing her.

Ember shuddered, both at the sight of of Phantom, still as marble, as well as the memory of her own captivity. There had been a scientist there, she was sure. She knew because she could hear him giggle. He always made sure to stay just out of her line of sight, however, reduced to a narrow band by the hard metal clasps that kept her pinned to the table. Whether by accident or his own psychotic design, the room was prone to echoing, making the scientist's laughter impossible to pin to any one location. Every now and then, however, a hand would reach from somewhere above her head, from a slightly different place every time, sometimes with a knife, sometimes a scoop. Each time, the hand, made milky from the glove that encased it, would cut a little deeper, and scoop a little more. And in between, the giggling would last just a little longer, get a little louder, seem a little less controlled. 

Ember shuddered. 

If her own scientist hadn't been such a sadist- 

If Phantom been there, or just chosen to save his own skin instead-

They would have ended her: She would be dead, this time for good.

Ember minced over to where Phantom lay, trying to ignore the distant shouting, just loud enough to be heard over the alarms still blaring from the facility above. 

“C'mon Dipstick, your beauty sleep can wait, get up.” As much as she hated his chatter, A conscious Phantom was a Phantom who could at least keep a grip on her back, saving from having to support his full weight. At this rate, even the smallest of advantages were a necessity. 

“Dipstick, hey! Babybop! Wake up!” Ember smacked one pale cheek as she spoke, trying to ignore the undried ectoplasm that peeled away with her touch. He couldn't be gone, because Phantom was a ghost, and ghosts destabilized when they ended, melting down to nothing. He was still solid, so logically, he had to be fine.

Except Phantom wasn't just a ghost, he was human, too, and humans, Ember knew, looked essentially the same whether they were alive or dead, at least at first.

“Shit.”

Ember put a little more weight into her attempts to jostle him awake, trying to ignore the increasing proximity of the shouts from above the hill, their pursuers taking the slope at a more sedate, but inexorable pace. 

“Wake up Dipstick! If you end on me now, I'll brainwash your whole stupid town! I'll steal your portal! I'll write a whole song dedicated to how you were finished like a fucking moron in the middle of the woods, so wake the hell up!”

She smacked him one more time, and finally, Phantom stirred, one dull green eye squinting against the pain of his awareness. 

“...Sam?” The inquiry was little more than a hoarse mutter, “What're we? What's going on?”

“For the last time, I'm not your—you know what? Fuck it, C'mon, we've gotta move.” Ember hauled him up, managing to hoist him back up to her shoulders after a brief struggle. She was tired, and Phantom was heavy, far more than any full ghost his size should be. 

The brief respite had done nothing to refresh her, had, indeed, served only to emphasize just how much everything hurt. Every cut and gouge, every bruise and ache sent painful protests to the center of her core. Phantom, serving as a literal deadweight, did nothing to help. The sheer quantity of ectoplasm he'd managed to bleed making him even more difficult to hold, turning the space between them into a slippery mess.

Ember kept her focus narrow, ignoring the terrifying dampness that slid down her back, the sharp blade of agony that every other step sent her way, the chafe of the suppressor that sent its own suffocating sensation deep into the very center of her being. She was Ember Mclain, she was a popstar, and she was going to keep moving.

Ember stumbled foreward, gaining a little momentum with each passing minuet. Her healing ability, reduced though it was, still seemed to be functioning, and she felt just a little of her energy returning over time.

Ember used that energy to go faster, deliberately ducking low into the foliage in an attempt to hide the feeble glow they both put off. The sirens still wailed above, a high, oscillating lament for the captives that fled it. They were still being chased on foot, as well, but the search hadn't yet found the ectoplasm trail Ember knew they were leaving, whether thanks to the greenery of the underbrush being sufficiently close to the hue of 'plasm to hide the color, or just simple luck was impossible to say. All that mattered was that they were once again gaining a lead over their pursuers. 

It was in that moment, of course, just as Ember began to hope, that Phantom, the dick, just had to ruin it.

Ember was trudging through an especially thick patch of undergrowth when it happened. The dipstick had been muttering to himself this whole time, something about how nature reserves were more hippy than goth when he suddenly went silent, the hands that had only loosely kept a grip on her letting go completely. Ember, unable to completely hold her him on her own, was left trying to keep a grip on his bottom half as his front flopped backwards, almost bringing her down with him. 

Again!?

Ember dropped his legs, allowing them to thump against the forest floor. Why, why, why, today, of all days, did everything have to go wrong? 

She should just leave him, she really should. Ancients, he was probably the reason she'd been snatched in the first place! One way or the other, Phantom seemed to attract trouble, bringing it with him like a tide that swept everyone and everything around him into its depths.

So what if she was usually one of the ones causing the trouble?

So what if he'd saved her, in spite of it all?

“Ugh.” 

Running out of the question, Ember grabbed his legs once more, looking for a suitable hiding spot, instead. Phantom was going to so owe her for this, fucking big time. She tried to distract herself from the increasing proximity of their pursuers –Had they found the ectoplasm trail?–by imagining all the ways she could spend that favor later on. 

“Ooow, Sam, watch the...head.”

“Shut it, Dipstick.” 

She could hear a stream off to their left, the indisputable culprit of both the thick gnarl of plantlife crowding every inch of space, and the all pervading film of pure wet that clung to her skin like spittle. The sensation was disgusting, and did nothing to warm her to the idea of trodding through an entire stream of water by her own volition. It was, however, their only chance of erasing their trail, both physically and chemically. 

Phantom had gone quiet again, descending from unfocused complaints at “Sam's” manhandling as he was drug over the ground to near total silence. The only sign that he was even slightly conscious was the hard, burbling rasp that came with each ill advised respiration. Breathing was a stupid hobby for a ghost to have, but it was a sign, at least, that he wasn't completely gone, the way he seemed to be when he collapsed just minuets before. 

It was not long after the thought had passed her mind that the stream, or rather, the river, came into view, announcing itself as a sudden streak of liquid sunshine glittering between the mouldering latticework of twigs and branches knotted against it. 

It was also then, at that moment, she heard a victorious shout, flat and brassy in the way living voices always were, followed by a harsh rustling of greenery disrupted by the large forms now rushing through it.

They'd been found.

Ember didn't even bother to haul Phantom back up to her shoulders before breaking into a sprint. Her toe screamed anew, tender scabs were jostled open and erupted into emerald streams of pure hurt, and Ember noticed none of it. All her concentration, all her prodigious will, focused on that shining pathway that lay just ahead.  
She was so focused, in fact, that the steep incline of the river embankment skipped her awareness entirely. Only when her feet met air, pinwheeling for a moment before falling down with the rest of her, did she register her mistake.

In her bid for freedom, Ember and her woebeggotten cargo tumbled once again into the earth, down and down, where the river lay waiting. 

Ember felt the water hit her like a full body slap, smashing against her side in brief repudiation before the surface tension broke, and she was swallowed beneath the stream. 

Her first coherent thought, once she finally had the chance to process the last few seconds of her increasingly awful day, was that living realm water was almost insultingly different from what she had become accustomed to in the Infinite realms. There, what was known as water was a thick, opaque substance, frequently warm from the sheer density of the energy that formed it. Practically anything could float on that kind of water, and practically everything did. Ember could still recall an entire lair on one particularly large stream, riding the waves on mechanical fins expertly rigged to the rocky sides of the isle. Each passing fin had set off flares of color as the stream was disturbed, spreading out in great, multihued ovals that scattered and mixed among the waves. It had been an awesome sight, and truly beautiful.

This stream, however, was nothing like pretty. Once her head went below the surface, the illusion of gold was replaced with a dark, muddy reality. Blurred and shadowed forms, obscured further by tumbling leaves and black twiglets, whirled past her vision, while she herself was pulled along with them by the cold mountain current, which snuffed out the flames of her hair and thrust cold fingers down every possible orifice with repulsive glee as it dragged her foreward. 

Ember grabbed Phantom, who had almost immediately begun to flail towards the surface, forced out of his stupor by some unknowable human instinct that spurred him to panic once submerged.

Ember dragged the both of them farther down, fighting against the buoyancy that wanted to keep them both floating somewhere just above the midway point in the stream. There was a dark patch near the bottom of the river, just above where the water transitioned from stream to silt, some kind of larger stone poking out from amongst the muck, or perhaps even a hollow place, deep enough to provide shelter against the ever pulling current. 

It took longer than she'd hoped, with Phantom tugging against her all the while, but she made it, and it was better than she had even dared to hope. There, peeking out from two great, stony shelves that had thrust themselves above the thick mud-drifts that seemed to coat everything in that dim underworld of living slime and half-suspended earth, was a cave. 

Ember grabbed onto the edge of the outcropping, using the leverage to push herself forward, then down, deeper into the columnar hollow that opened up beyond the narrow entryway. While both their glows had been reduced to almost nothing, there still remained sufficient light for Ember to see how the ground leveled out not too long into her swim, and spot the hole from which the current, which had never ceased to swirl against her, appeared to spring. 

Embers memories of her time as a human, like all ghosts, were dim, broken things, little more than a handful sand clutched against the wind. Looking at that darker hole, fire core aching with increasing intensity from the combination of constant exertion paired with the all pervasive cold and wet, however, Ember recalled, with sudden, brutal clarity, how mountain streams were often fed by underground rivers, some of which opened up into caves. 

Ember was nearly finished, the exertions of the day finally stacking up into something more than her consciousnesses could bear. She also knew that she couldn't quit, not yet. They had escaped the humans, escaped the forest, and now, with the chance to escape the river, so tantalizingly close, how could she possibly give up now?

With the last of the force remaining in her limbs, ignoring the screams of pain each motion incited, Ember pushed against the current, pulling Phantom just behind, until they were through the opening at last, and Ember felt her face breach the surface of the stream. 

The sensation of air was pure relief, a gentle caress against cheeks abraded by gnarled woods and rushing waters. Ember clambered onto the bank, whose silty surface was mixed with mica, forming silicate stars quickly snuffed by the murk Ember was now free to heave out of her system, preventing it from diluting what ectoplasm she had left. 

She managed a glance at Phantom, who was likewise in the process of expelling his own quantity of liquid onto the shining ground, quite a bit more, she noted, than what she herself had voided moments before. 

“That's what you get for breathing, baby bop.”

Ember's last thought before unconsciousness subsumed her was that maybe the dipstick would finally quit that peculiar habit of respiration. It couldn't be healthy, working his abdomen all the time like that, when it could just as well rest instead.


	2. Hide

Ghosts couldn't dream. 

Some of the more scholarly ghosts, the kind Ember usually preferred to avoid, liked to speculate as to why. the theory among such types was that the dead never dreamed because they never slept, at least not truly. Rather, on those rare occasions a ghost's core was stressed to the point it could no longer maintain form as well as consciousness, the body was simply granted priority above that of the mind.

In that sense, a ghost's sleep was more akin to that of a human coma: A slide closer to oblivion, a brief stuttering of the mind as it fought against the fall, a bad copy of the relief that came from the peace born from true rest.

That was why, when Ember awoke to a mouthful of dirt and the sensation of someone prodding her side, she knew for a fact that it was no nightmare. 

Even though she very much wished it was. 

“Ember? Ember? Whoa—“

Phantom, damn him, somehow managed to spot the fist she sent by way of response, lurching back just far enough to let her attack go sailing inches from his face. 

“What the heck, Ember! I was trying to help!” 

“Well I was trying to sleep, so quit it, wouldja?”

“Ghosts can sleep?” His tone was one of utter bafflement.

“Duh.” Wasn't he the one who was always complaining about how other ghosts were ruining his beauty sleep? Ember didn't get what was so surprising. 

“Oh, uh, sorry? Honestly, I thought you were dying. Ending. You know.” Ember could practically see the nervous gesture, hand against neck, that Phantom was so prone to making as he spoke. 

“You had gone all blurry, sorta fused together like one giant blob ghost, I was seriously afraid you were going to start melting if I didn't do something about it.”

Sleeping made her look like a blob? That, she honestly hadn't known. It wasn't as though ghosts slept much, ever, if they could help it. On those rare occasions Ember had been forced to sleep, she'd managed to do it in her lair, protected and alone.

“Yeah, well I'm fine. Just super.” Ember still hadn't bothered to raise her head out of the dirt. Only the thought of deforming while unconscious, in front of Phantom, of all people, kept her from giving into the exhaustion all over again. “Just lemme alone.”

“Ember, wait.” Phantom touched her again, this time gently, on the shoulder. Ember was familiar with the gesture, she'd seen humans do it often enough, but wasn't entirely clear as to what it was supposed to mean.

“At least tell me what's going on. The last thing I remember is us getting captured, then I wake up and we're – where are we, anyway? Why do I feel like someone threw me through a garbage disposal? And why the fudge am I still a ghost!?”

Ember groaned, sober Phantom, it seemed, was just as prone to nattering as his stoned counterpart. Mustering all her remaining energy, Ember tried to think of a way to end the conversation as quickly as possible.

“Cave. Brought us here. Crazy humans beat us up. Dunno what you mean about ghosts, but if you're messed up, blame these.” Ember loosely brought her forearm, shaking her shackled wrist for emphasis. 

“Power restraints?” She felt him grab her wrists, observing the white ring bound thereon before letting out a low groan. “These are good, like my dad was giving away ghost hunting tech again good. If it were the old model, I could've gotten us out, but this – ” She heard something scrape against the restrainers, followed by a shock coursing down her arm in a bolt of sheer pain.

“Ancients!”

“ – could take a while. ” 

“What the hell was that!?”

“Sorry, sorry, I think it has some kind of anti-tampering thing on it? Just give me a sec and I'll—”

“Fuck no!” Ember scooted away, an action which hurt more than she remembered, before rolling to her side, allowing her the perfect angle to glare without actually expending an excess of energy. A necessity, it seemed, when one spent any time at all in the dipstick's general vicinity. “If you want to play around, do it on yourself.”  
She gave him one more, particularly cutting look, just for emphasis, before allowing her head to fall back to the earth. 

Realms, she was tired. 

Unfortunately, sleep proved harder to grasp than she expected. Though just as exhausted as before, the world around her kept intruding just enough to keep her distracted.

Everything, from the omnipresent clatter of the river just behind, to the aches and pains of her own body, seemed to conspire against her every attempt to ignore them. The moment they seemed to fade into the background, something would twinge down in her leg, or a wavelet would lap against the muddy shore of the river bank in such a fashion that Ember would be jerked back to full awareness whether she wished it or not.

That she was aware of another ghost beside her, awake and potentially a threat, bothered her also. As much as she was sure Phantom was too much of a goody two shoes to do anything to her, the idea of slumping into some helpless blob in front of him was an anathema.

The persistent yelps that came from his direction, the sort one might make if they just so happened to be fiddling with a device that existed for the express purpose of making them suffer, was not doing much to help. 

“Ah, huh, whew.” Phantom leaned back, wincing as his own remaining wounds, far nastier than Ember's own, reprimanded him for the motion. She honestly wasn't sure how he was up, much less so damn cheerful. “I got the casing off, but the insides are going to be harder. This is definitely one of my parents better designs, which means it's one of their worse designs, which means I am so haunting – ugh!”

He'd been picking at the exposed mechanics as he spoke, which sent yet another shock through his system for the attempt. 

“-all my dad's fudge, and his ham. As soon as I get back. ow.” Phantom bent over, clutching at his chest, the dirty, tattered gown doing nothing to hide the long green strips that had been cut into his flesh. The veneer slipped, if only for a moment, and pain, frustration, and agony were clear on his features as he heaved against the punishment. 

“Ancients, just let it go.” How precisely someone else's pain and suffering could be aggravating, Ember wasn't sure, but then again, it was the Dipstick. He was talented like that. “I don't know if you noticed, baby-bop, but you're not exactly Technus, what are you even gonna do? Fix it?”

Oddly, that seemed to strike him as funny, inspiring a harsh, wheezing laugh from the hollows of his sundered breast.

“Technus? Oh, if he were here, just imagine: 'I, Technus, master of all technology,' “ Phantom pitched his voice high, an unexpectedly decent copy Technus's nasal intonation, “ 'Have now turned these power suppressing cuffs into power suppressing armor! Behold!' ” Phantom began chuckling again, painfully, maniacally, bent over double without any regard to the fresh upweltering of ectoplasm the motion inspired. 

"God, that would be lame." He said.

There was a pause, the sound of the river doing little to mask the greater silence of the cavern at large. Mouthless stone bore forth the quietude of millinia on, seeping into every shadow, bearing down upon the two ghost's pallid glows in a slow press of ages. The darkness was too old, too wise to strangle, but the weight of it, the ominous press of eternity, pushed with a force passionless as a mountain upon an ant. A living thing could flee death, the darkness whispered, and a ghost may spite it, but neither could escape. Not now, not then, nor ever.

Never before had Ember heard that promise more clearly, than in the still breath of that hollow place, and the silence which lurked therein.

She was still exhausted, but, very suddenly, Ember found she was no longer tempted to sleep. 

“Hey.”

Phantom had taken to staring at the cuff in lieu of fiddling with it, mouth thinned into a contemplative half moon as he gazed fixedly at the device. Whether it was some attempt to visually plot out its inner workings, or he was simply lost in his rather sudden fit of ennui, Ember cared not at all.

“Hey Dipstick!” 

“Huh?” He looked up, a mildly surprised expression plastered across his face. 

“You didn't answer my question.” Reluctantly, Ember pushed herself up on one elbow, affecting a decent show of awareness. “You're not some tech ghost, so what are you even trying to do? Aside from hurt yourself for fun, I mean.” 

Phantom had the gall to roll his eyes. “Would having someone like Technus even help? I mean, he only knows how technology works in the first place because his power lets him, right? So wouldn't these-” he tapped the cuff with his free hand, “Sort of, I dunno, turn that off?”

“What!? No way.” What was he suggesting? 

“They're power suppressors, not mind suppressors. It's not like they would fuck with our core. Even if he couldn't manipulate them directly, he'd remember how it'd work.”

“Would he?” Phantom flicked his gaze up from the device, one eyebrow raised. 

“Duh.” 

“Do you remember?”

Ember squinted at him. “What, technology?”

“Nah, music. How to sing, play instruments, that stuff.”

“Of course I fucking remember!” How dare he! Ember felt a flare of anger at the mere idea that her one talent, her one unique skill, could possibly be manipulated by some sort of over glorified wrist bangle. The idea wasn't just insulting, it was absurd.

“Even the things you never practiced?”

The abuse she had been all set to pour down Phantom's idiot head stuck halfway up her throat.

“...what.”

“Well, I guess you actually worked at some of your music stuff, or did when you were alive. That probably carried over. But if you're a music ghost, then your powers should help you in anything related to it. Like to, uh, play the Oboe, even though you've never actually learned it, in the same way Technus can program stuff, even though he died way before CSS or Java was a thing and never really put in the effort to really figure them out. I just thought, the general theory is, suppressors work on all aspects of a power...not just...the active ones...”

Phantom must have seen the look on her face, or perhaps simply realized the sheer scope of what he was implying, as he had the decency to pause. 

“Or not! Totally possible! I, none of my powers are passive like that, so I don't, I don't really know.”

Now that she thought about it, Ember never had taught herself to play the oboe.

“Ember? Eeember? Hello?”

But she did know how to play it, she was certain, she remembered remembering. 

“Did I break her?”

So why were the exact details suddenly so hard to grasp? 

“Oh god, I totally broke her.”

Ember was brought out of her stupor by Phantom, who, ever the gentleman, had seen fit to scoot directly into her personal space, where he had taken to snapping his fingers just below her eyes.

“Would you stop that!” Ember swept aside his intruding arm, anger providing a welcome buffer between herself and the implications her own disturbing epiphany. Her hair, now dried, sent up a shower of sparks as they reignited at the ends. 

“Hey! I'm not the one who zoned out all of a sudden!”

“I'm not the one bullshitting about other people's powers! Why would you even think that!? Why would you even want to think that? What is wrong with you?”

“I was just trying to help!”

“Well big help. Dipstick, I can't play the oboe, not as long as I've got one of your parent's little fashion statements glued to my wrist!”

Ember shoved him away, ignoring the hard flinch it incited, before flopping back down to the cold earth. 

“Happy now?” She asked. 

“...Sorry.” She heard Phantom scoot away, the steady tapping of his attempts to pry apart his own cuffs resumed a second later.

The silence lasted for about a minuet.

“I guess, I grew up with this. How ghosts work, why they work, what they can do, blah, blah, blah. Then I became a halfa, and all those questions became practical. I couldn't not think about them, because my arm was sinking through my desk and I thought, maybe if I could just figure out how and why then maybe I could make it stop. And with my parents still going on and on about ghost science and suddenly having to deal with all their inventions working on me I couldn't avoid it even if I wanted to, it just never occurred to me that—ow!” 

It seemed Phantom still hadn't bypassed whatever was causing the shocks, as he was suddenly interrupted by the bracelet's defense system. Ember raised her head slightly, where she found Phantom lain prone from the pain. 

“It just never occurred to me that it wasn't normal, that you guys didn't _need_ to wonder, all the time, over what you were.”

He sighed, then, slowly, with a stiffness of motion that betrayed just how much he must surely hurt, Ember watched Phantom push himself back up, before bending over the bracelet once again. 

Gone was the foolish teenager who she'd drug through a forest and down a hole. In his place sat a youth of steely determination and unyielding will, weary but unbeaten. He looked down at the cuffs with grim obstinance, a look Ember was surprised to find she recognized: It was the same expression he often bore not just when fighting her, but any ghost that challenged him within his territory.

“Fucking hell, no wonder you're a psycho.”

For some reason this brought out a smirk, the visage of the warrior she'd glimpsed before crumpling beneath the wry half moon of its humor.

"Eh, better psycho than a fruitloop any day."

Conversation finished, silence lapsed again between the two, the discomfiting physicality of it reminding Ember why she had done something as ludicrous as attempt conversation with Phantom, of all ghosts, from the start.

Kitty would've loved this, Ember reflected. Always more curious than her friend, the biker ghost would've seized the opportunity to extract any morsel of gossip worthy material from a real-life hybrid. She had a way about her, too, of making the most awful situations more amusing than they had any right to be. 

She felt a faint smile creep up her cheeks at the thought of her friend. If only she were stuck here with Kitty, things might still be just as desperate, but at least she would have someone to talk to, someone she understood and could be understood by, and not the mad thing beside her. Not stupid, stupid, Phantom, who treated being captured, cut, and suppressed as though it were somehow routine. 

In fact...

If the she was stuck with the dipstick, she may as well get some use out of it, she supposed. She could bring some fun facts back to Kitty, and maybe even get back at Phantom for pulling the rug out from under her very sense of self. 

He wasn't the only one who could ask uncomfortable questions, after all. 

“Hey.”

The fact that Ember was now suddenly, viscerally homesick was not related in the least. 

“What now, Ember?” 

Phantom's voice was aggrieved. He had been in bad shape from the start, and the constant jolts to his system obviously weren't be helping. His hands shook, and a slick layer of sweat beaded his forehead as he fought to keep them steady, reaching again and again for the device he knew would hurt him. His expression, however, was still held the same, stolid determination of before. Indeed, it had, if anything, become all the firmer.

“What's it like to be alive?”

“Eh!??”

“I said, what's it like to be alive. None of the humans can explain, and I don't remember.” She shrugged, affecting nonchalance, “So I thought I'd ask you.”

“No, uh, it's just I normally get the question the other way around." Phantom seemed somewhat flustered. "Most ghosts I actually talk to don't bring that stuff up."

Those ghosts, unlike Ember, were probably his friends. Very little was known about halfas, but one place where both ancient legend and modern rumor agreed was that such creatures were touchy about the finer details of what they were, exactly.

Phantom, however, didn't seem overly bothered, actually pausing in his masochistic attempts at cuff disassembly as he contemplated the question. 

“Living is...it's like a clean blanket, like right out of the drier, that you're wrapped up in, but not inside, you know?”

Ember didn't know, but Phantom didn't seem to notice, his eyes taking on a distant quality as he barreled on.

“You're out on one of those really good autumn nights, where the sky is clear and all the leaves have turned but haven't fallen yet, and you know its cold out, but you've got your blanket, and you know its dark, but there's the whole sky above you, and you know it won't last forever, but you don't want to go, because you know once you do, it's gone. 

"You can get a new blanket, or go out on another night, but it won't be the same. It won't be _that_ night or _that_ blanket, cause you only get both of those once, no matter how many times you come back, or what kind of thing you become, it's already gone..."

Phantoms gaze slid back to the present, refocusing on her. “So yeah, that's living.” He seemed oddly proud of himself as he said it. 

“Dipstick.”

“Yeah?”

“You made a lot more sense when you were high.” 

“Hey! I'm a C average student, Okay?”

“Seriously? You were going on and on about Clockwork being some kind of space-time ghost, and I got more out of that than fucking blankets.” 

“Clockwork _is_ a space-time ghost, otherwise his portals could only pop up in any time, not in any place, and you know he can totally do both!” 

“Sure thing, baby-bop, that's totally how it works.” Not that Ember actually knew anything about the powers of the near legendary monster that supposedly lurked not far from her own lair, but it gave her an excuse to dismiss Phantom and his nonsense, to regain a sense of control that came with the familiar verbal parlay that was as much a part of competition among the Wastelanders as physical combat. 

She could ignore where she was, like this. She could ignore how she'd gotten there, and, if only she could annoy the dipstick hard enough, she might be able to ignore that he was their best bet for escaping where they had ended up.

“It totally is! Just because the rules get weird in the ghost zone doesn't mean they're gone. There's got to be some kind of logic to it!”

“Like how you can fit an entire country behind a flying door?” Ember scoffed, “Sure, your living world rules totally work inside a completely different dimension, ”

“It's not a different dimension!” Realms, the Dipstick was getting properly worked up now, gesticulating broadly as he spoke.

“Pft. Like you would know.”

“I do!”

“What, did Clockwork tell you that, too?” Ember rolled her eyes, the very picture of smug. She affixed her best smirk to her face too, just to drive home the victory of which she was now so certain. 

Yes, this was how it was supposed to be, this was the rhythm to which she was accustomed. She would pick a fight, and Phantom, or Skulker, or whoever the hell was in range that day, would fall to match her, distracting her from whatever ill had tried to rise from the mental depths she threw them in, buried beneath the petty violence and snappy comebacks that made it so much easier not to think.

Phantom, however, wasn't done yet.

“Yeah.” he replied, “He was the one who told me the Ghost Zone and reality are connected, messing up one messes up the other.”

“And I guess he told you how, too, huh?” Ember asked, mildly irritated. The Dipstick truly didn't know a loss when he saw one.

“He said they were like two sides of the same coin.” Phantom cast his eyes back down to his cuff, which he began to fiddle with again, as though something about the subject made him uncomfortable. “But I think, it's more like the inverse version of the same side? Like a mobius strip.”

“Huh?” He'd lost her.

“A mobius strip. They're these weird twisted loop things with one side and one edge. They thought the universe might be one for a while, so I learned a bit about them, 'cause it was space travel stuff, I guess.”

Something clicked in the suppressor, and Ember prepared herself for a yelp that never came. Whatever it was that Phantom had pulled off this time hadn't triggered any sort of defensive shock. 

“The crazy thing about mobius strips is how they loop. Anything living on a mobius strip could understand everything _but_ the twist, because they're two dimensional people living on a mostly two dimensional plane, but the loop in a mobius strip can only be seen by something that lives one dimension higher, in 3D."

Ember wanted to interject, regain control of a conversation that was rapidly slipping out of her grasp once again, something snarky and reflective of how little she cared, but she wasn't fast enough, as Phantom's mouth, like his fingers, seemed to settle into a groove. 

“Imagine we're all paper ants living on something like a mobius strip. The ant starts at one point, then travels the full loop, completing the circuit of a full, living life. But mobius strips are weird, and crawling once around the edge doesn't actually take you the full length of the strip: _it inverts you instead_. You end up in a perfect opposite to where you began, on the other side of the curve without even knowing how you got there in the first place."

Phantom gave a faint half smile, nearly a smirk, though with an edge of ennui that belayed the sense of trepidation that lurked beneath it.

“It kind of explains halfa's, too. Most of the ants have to travel the full loop to move between life and death, but some ants manage to find a hole, something that lets them crawl from one side to the other without having to go all the way around each time. And 'cause these are magic ants, I guess, they can take the hole with them, at least for a while, as they keep going around and around.”

Something snapped, and Phantom tugged what looked like a small, glowing green box out from the depths of his suppressor.

“Ah-ha! The ecto-collecter! Almost got it!” He pumped his fist, a motion that was immediately followed by a wince, the gesture rather obviously aggravating his many wounds. 

“But, yeah, like I was saying, we can see what mobius strips are because it's a 3D loop, and we're 3D beings, but there's another version of these things, called Klien bottles, that are the same thing, but with a 4D twist instead of a 3D one. If the life and death, the ghost zone and the real world, really were one of these things, than we'd be the same as ants drawn on a mobius strip, looping around and around a shape we can't understand, in directions we can't see, basically forever."

One last twist, and the suppressor finally gave out, falling off the halfa's wrist with an unimpressive thump into the muck below. Phantom smiled at her, a full, broad grin of victory.

“Cool, right?” 

“Phantom.” Ember's core ached, but there was no way, absolutely none, she would let the dipstick get the last word in, not after all this.

“Hm?” He tilted his head, unmindful of the bright sparks forming around his waist as he awaited her reply.

“You're still really fucking psycho." Full blown, extra goddamn crazy. "I don't get how you even stand it.”

“Eh, you learn to live.” Phantom shrugged as the sparks formed a ring, shining with a painful clairity in the vanquished dark.

“Or learn to die, I guess. Whichever works.”

The rings split, washing over him in a swift, smooth motion. Green wounds turned red, pale white locks darkened to a glossy black, overhanging pale blue eyes filled with that eerie depth so distinctive of the living.

The change from ghost to human didn't take more than a second, maybe two, and Phantom didn't move an inch while it happened. 

But in those scant moments, watching the change occur, Ember couldn't help but be struck by the sudden conviction that he was somehow in motion, falling at an angle that didn't exist, down a most peculiar kind of hole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here you have it, the actual point this whole thing was leading up to. I tend to picture Ember as a fundamentally uncurious sort of person, which is part why I had so much trouble getting here. It took a lot of beating to put her and Danny in a position where they could actually converse without either one deflecting, squabbling, or both.
> 
> I tried to make the explanation of mobius strips as coherent as possible, but it's been a while since I read up on these things, so if it doesn't make sense to you, yell at me in the comments or something, and I'll try to fix it.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally planned to be a oneshot numbering ~5,000 or so words. Me being myself, however, bloat ensued, so it's going to be two chapters instead.


End file.
